Is it a hack? Is it kismet? Do I just get really attached to my content once I create it? I do not know the answers to these questions.
Is it the ultimate recycling? Maybe. But here is the deal:
This week, I am sharing content - Simple Systems to Get Organized Before 2027- that I recently created -again - for a recent professional development session with a company.
It is much less Clutter specific, which is a shift from the last two weeks, and much more productivity specific! And at first, I was worried the productivity content might feel a little too workplace specific, but hey - can’t we all use some productivity strategies some days? Working smarter not harder, getting the important work done with more ease and less stress?
That’s what we’re working on today!
For this recent PD session, I was presenting to a group I have presented to previously. As we got started, I reminded them of the tools and strategies I’ve talked about before, and I’ll do the same here!
Goal Setting;
Focus Areas;
Prioritizing;
Routines around Getting Ready and Self-Regulation;
Deep Breathing and Nature Breaks;
Start with A Short List of 3;
Time Blocking and Batch Work:
Specificity;
Recipes, for repeated work / duplicative processes;
Factor in Rest;
Manage Phone Calls Like Meetings; and
Routines for Personal and Household Tasks
And the content question was around systems, so what is a system?
A system is a group of related tasks, purposefully working towards an end or goal. Routines are how we handle those system tasks, attached to times and events so the tasks will happen.
Consider this, too, as we look at systems: Our brain is not meant to be an administrative assistant, remembering all the details ALL THE TIME. Figure out your systems now and then set them to make live flow more smoothly.
The first thing this group and I talked about in that session was email management. If you’re a community member, a regular reader of my newsletter or listener of my podcast, you know I talked about email at length over the summer.
The article and episode was titled “Email Is a Tool—Use It Well: Make Email Work For You”, https://www.peaceofmindpo.com/blog/email-is-a-tooluse-it-well-make-email-work-for-you
And since I just talked about email at length a few months ago, let me recap the highlights:
Email is inevitable and necessary, there is no use fighting it or getting frustrated.
Do not use your in-box as a to-do list. OR bulletin board. Or calendar. Things get lost.
Add information from emails into the appropriate place holders.
Personalize your account and train it to handle certain types of messages in certain ways. And for goodness sake, make and use folders for completed work!
And, check your Spam folder regularly, sometimes NOT-Spam ends up there.
Next up, Task Follow-Up
Work flows. Right? You’ve heard the term, “work flow”?
So what does that tell us? Work comes, work goes. Tasks come, tasks go. Tasks get completed and we move on. In addition, sometimes tasks come back as maintenance tasks, and we need to do them again.
What that also tells us is that often, our work is predictable, consistent, recurring.
So, we DO NOT need to waste time solving the same work questions over and over again. We can come up with the best system for our work, so it flows even more smoothly.
The tip here? Write a work flow for regular and common tasks. I call these Template Tasks, but they can also be considered a work flow, or a recipe, or a check list, call it what you want.
For example, I shared with my presentation attendees that the tasks around preparing for a presentation are almost always the same.
I receive a request to schedule a presentation.
If the coordinator doesn’t know me, I send samples of my presentations and handouts. They will choose, and then we schedule it.
If the coordinator knows me, they will ask for a specific presentation or topic and we will schedule it.
Then I ask about logistics - AV set up, parking details, payment, etc.
A few weeks before our scheduled event, I will check in with all the logistics again, confirm details, ask about number of people attending, etc., and make my copies.
The day before, I will check my notes and pack my bag.
Every. Single. Time.
Afterwards, I will send a thank you and follow up on any payment questions. Every time.
On a personal note, maybe your work flow, for example, is about paying your bills or doing your on-line banking. An example I used to share about template tasks was reconciling my business’s monthly banking and credit card statements online. This was a task I did often enough to need a work flow but not often enough that it had become a habit and I could do it without thinking about it.
What day of the month do I expect the statements to arrive? How much time do the tasks take? Do I pay the credit card bill first, or reconcile the statement first? Etc., Etc., Etc.
I figured out the best path for completing the work, created a workflow or template of the steps and I park that short workflow list on my to-do list for the 2nd of every month along with my bill paying for the week. Then I ignore it until the 2nd of the month. The whole process takes 10 minutes, top. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Because I set up the system and now I can use it all the time.
A similar strategy is creating your own bank of Frequently Asked Questions, where applicable.
For example, the group I presented to interacts A LOT with their clients, and while every client is individual and special, the client questions are not. After I suggested creating a draft email with answers to FAQs, one of the attendees asked ChatGPT to look at their emails from the last 60 days and pull out frequently asked questions and their answers. And in less than three minutes, she had a beautiful report of FAQs broken down by categories.
She wrote the answers, the work was hers, but now she had a bank of responses so she didn’t have to re-write the answers every time someone asked. Whew.
Let’s talk info management, digital or paper files
I recently wrote “A What?” Why Naming Conventions Might Change Your Life, https://www.peaceofmindpo.com/blog/a-what-why-naming-conventions-might-change-your-life . If you missed it, please go back and check out that article and episode from March.
To sum up, a naming convention is a rule of thumb for organizing and titling data, digital or paper, so we can quickly and consistently find things again. For example, 2026 Client Last Name and Destination, or 2026 Fall Promotional Materials.
One of my presentation participants was very excited to start using Naming Conventions for shared documents on their shared drives. By consistently using the same logical path when naming documents, she and co-workers can save and also find shared information faster.
Finally, let’s look at preparing for year-end and 2027 planning
We all need to create one folder right now if we don’t already have it, Taxes 2026. Add all the tax documents, thank you letters, receipts, etc. to that folder now so tax time is easier in 2027.
Also this week, find ANYTHING that can be completed NOW to help you get ahead in December. Holiday related – holiday photo NOW!, buy gifts NOW! Scheduling related, kid stuff? Family stuff? Did I see a sign this week for “Holiday Light Installation” as I drove to a client’s? Yes, yes I did. If that is something you need, they are scheduling now, go ahead and call them now!
What are your other systems? At work or in life? And if any of them regularly make you struggle, take a step back and look at how they might be improved or streamlined.
For example, in the presentation I shared that 2 Decembers ago, when I was looking ahead to January at 13 presentations in 21 days, I asked myself what could I do to make that super-hectic month go more smoothly. I started batch cooking on Sundays for food for the week, I set up multiple presentation outfits and took pictures so I could get ready more smoothly, and I made hundreds of copies of my more popular handouts all at once to share at those presentations.
So, what did we learn last year? And yes, I mean, look it up. What was awesome and where did you stumble? Leave notes for yourself. For future you. Yes, I leave notes every January for myself for the next January. For example, notes on how to generate end of year reports, send out tax documents for my assistant or clients, or what goals I want to set for the new year.
Finally, it’s Q4. Start creating your January / 2027 list NOW! In a quick search of past blogs, I have suggested making a January List at least 8 times. However, and this is a note for my upcoming content calendar, I don’t have an article or episode dedicated just to this idea.
Look at your goals, if you set goals. Are there any 2026 goals that were not achieved this year? Knowing November and December are busy, do you want to rededicate to completing those goals? Or, if they are still worth completing but not as urgent as some, perhaps they can move to the 2027 list?
So, what did we learn?
We learned that a system is a group of related tasks.
We learned that brain is not meant to be an administrative assistant, remembering all the details ALL THE TIME.
We reviewed tools that can be applied to systems to make the system run more smoothly.
Specifically, we refreshed ideas about email
We looked at task follow-up in terms of template tasks and workflow
We refreshed our learning about information management with naming conventions, and
We looked at simple planning to wrap up 2026 and start 2027 strong.
Let’s look at those systems, and see where we can set ourselves up to succeed!
